In
some sense, the primary limitation of materialism is its “obviousness”.
We rely on our senses all the time, to the point where we place a great
deal of trust in those senses. And rightly so, relative to ordinary
functioning and survival: our senses are constantly keeping us alive,
whether we are speeding down the road in our automobiles and suddenly
swerve out of the way of an unexpected car; or we are spitting out something
that tastes “off”. Why would we want to bad-mouth such good friends
as these five? We are so intimate with (and habituated to) these friends
that there is even an emotional overtone of “obviousness” to everything
they “tell” us.

It’s
worth recalling how the "apparently obvious" has been shown
to be untrue —
the stuff of mere appearance —
time and time again.

Forget
for the moment all our school book learning. When we look up in the sky
over the course of a day, it is obvious
that the sun goes around the earth. It’s over to my left in the morning,
right above me at noon, and over to my right at sunset. It’s obvious
that the sun is moving and the earth isn’t. Yes, our contemporary belief
system include such “facts” as “The earth goes around the sun”,
but how many of us can actually recall the various reasons that led scientists
to switch their view? Most of us carry around a lot of “facts” like these,
in much the same way that the Sunday school student memorizes and then
carries around his or her religious “facts”.

Again,
suspending our awareness of all the “facts” we learned in school, we
can add to the catalog of obvious, directly perceivable facts that the
earth is flat —
not meaning that there are no mountains, etc., but that all of these
are aligned perpendicularly (“upward”) with respect to a flat plane,
and the upward direction of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California
is the same upward direction as
the Himalayas in Nepal.

If
the Earth were a globe, there certainly would be — if we could
imagine the thing, to be peopled all around — 'antipodes:' 'people
who,' says the dictionary, 'living exactly on the opposite side
of the globe to ourselves, having their feet opposite to ours'
— people who are hanging down, head downwards
while we are standing head up? But since the theory allows us
to travel to those parts of the earth where the people are said
to hang head downward, and still to fancy ourselves to be heads
upwards, and our friends whom we have left behind us to be heads
downwards, it follows that the whole
thing is a myth —
a dream — a delusion — and a
snare, and, instead of there being any evidence at all in this
direction to substantiate this popular theory, it is plain proof
that the Earth is Not A Globe.

We
could go on and on: The stars are tiny pinpoints of light; etc. That’s
the way it appears to be. Therefore,
according to naive realism, that’s the way it is.

Now
those among the Spiritually Realized don’t agree with this. The “material-only”
vision is not the way Reality appears
to them. And that is because they are not limited to “the five senses”.
They also have a “sixth sense”, a sense of feeling-awareness that reaches
beyond the body, beyond the material, beyond the realm of the five senses.
With proper activation and training of this sixth sense, God is as immediately
obvious and accessible as our own bodies are to us. The Spiritually
Realized see all that we see, sense all that we sense. But they are
also directly aware of much more
than us, and are directly aware that what the rest of us take as the
whole reality, is just the surface
of reality, “the
tip of the iceberg”. They are the explorers and Realizers of
the depth of Reality.

Scientific
materialism limits itself to the exploration of objective reality

While,
in going from simple materialism to scientific materialism, the scope
of phenomena considered “real” has been extraordinarily expanded (over
and against the exclusive use of the five senses alone), the requirement
for objective results, and hence for a separation between the perceiver
and the perceived, restricts exploration to objective
reality. It is not that the subjective realm doesn’t show
up at all; in the so-called “soft sciences” (where “soft” is measured
relative to that ultimate “hard” science, “physics”), such as psychology,
sociology, etc., people’s subjectivity is indeed examined, but is examined
as objectively as possible.

What
is disallowed from the purview of materialism is any participatory
exploration of reality, because that would result in a loss
of objectivity. But that participatory exploration through
the “instrument” of one’s own feeling-awareness turns out to be the
primary tool for exploring the Spiritual
and Transcendental dimensions of reality. Thus scientific materialism
inherently disallows the very means required to validate the Greater
Reality, and, because it takes a reductionistic stance, it is then forced
to declare that no such Greater Reality exists.

What
is “knowledge” in our time? It is epitomized by the method and
the accumulated culture of scientism. And the method of science
epitomizes the tendency toward non-participation. The method of
science is, at its best, a right and useful tool for acquiring
certain kinds of information or data about conditional events.
But as a world-view, or an ideal orientation toward existence,
it is nothing other than the attitude and method of egoity. This
is because it is based upon the abstraction or separation of the
observer from the observed. It expresses a preference for the
non-participation (or non-interference) of the observer in the
observed and in the results of the observation. . . .

The
disposition of scientism has, in our time, become the model or
ideal attitude toward what is.
Science has come out of the closet, from an esoteric discipline
engaged by a few revolutionaries, to a world-view that commands
what is acceptable as knowledge for all. I do not object to the
factual usefulness of the scientific method as one of the possible
tools of Man, but I thoroughly and vehemently object to the culturally
enforced notion that it is the single, sufficient, and ideal tool
of Man. . . .

Science
is not love. Science is not surrender. To do science is to stand
apart and inspect and analyze. To know without love and submission
is to magnify power and the motive of control. Power and control
are secondary needs of Man. Such knowledge is, therefore, only
a secondary need of Man. Science is only a secondary tool of Man.
What is our primary need and our primary tool? We need love, union,
unity. Our primary tool is participation. And participation requires
submission of self to what is. Therefore, participation is love,
or the act of loving or self-transcending submission. If we act
as love, submission, or in the attitude or by the tool of self-transcendence,
then we also come to know and experience. But the knowledge and
experience that come by such means do not enhance or magnify the
power of self to control what is. Rather, they enhance and magnify
our freedom, our Realization of Reality, and our ultimate Happiness.
. . .

We
cannot discover whether or not there is God, or soul, or Transcendental
Spiritual Reality by analytical or non-participatory means. The
ego cannot discover the Truth. . . . Our greatest need is to discover
the Truth. And in order to discover the Truth, we must understand
and transcend ourselves. . . . And if the Way of self-transcendence
is magnified as the fullness of participatory capability, then
what is will be discovered to be Divine, unbound, eternal, Transcendental
Happiness.

Avatar
Adi Da Samraj, “The Cult of Narcissus and the Culture of Participation”
p. 73, The Transmission Of Doubt

Scientists
often cast themselves (or are so cast by those that make them into the
high priests of our contemporary civilization) as the seekers of “truth”.
But at best, what they find are the facts and principles of the material
dimension of reality. That is, at best they are finding ways to characterize
(and control) objective reality. Truth is altogether different, altogether
greater. Truth is that which is changeless and unconditional, that which
is always already the case, even in the midst of the changing and conditional
reality. Finding the Truth transforms our sense of Reality and sets
us Free.

A
little earlier, we mentioned a “sixth sense” of feeling-awareness.
The “use” of this sense is participation and relationship. One cannot
be exercising this sense and also standing apart objectively. Thus,
the use of the scientific method precludes the use of feeling-awareness.
More specifically, objectification or standing apart is the result of
contracting from fullest feeling-awareness. Elsewhere,
I write how the ego is exactly this
separating-itself-out activity that my Spiritual Master calls the self-contraction.
Thus, no one comes to exercise this “sixth sense” of feeling-awareness
to any significant degree without a significant degree of self- (or
ego-)transcendence.